Carnival on Camac Street, Philadelphia
summer slides in hot & wet
drags with it the carnival that grows
on the empty lot on Camac Street
where O’Conner & Fink & I sometimes played
stickball & where I stepped on a bee
my first sting it didn’t hurt much
but the bee died
around the fallen insect
tents & rides booths & caravans
overnight seemed to spring from the ground
replacing the dry grass dead shrubs with
colored lights red white blue lining the
midway circling around & round the
Ferris wheel I was afraid to ride but if you
stopped at the top you could see all the way
to Birney School where I’d return in the Fall
but now I was free imagined running away
with the carnival because there was this
9 year old girl -my age- so pretty & different from the
Jewish girls I knew who were my friends & because her mother
told fortunes in a shadowy tent lit with candles & because
walking down the midway each booth promised another chance
to win a giant bear to give to my girlfriend if I could
knock down the bottles or break balloons or
throw rings over the pegs each try just
a nickle & ‘cause the carny smell led me to a
foreign land fried foods cheap hot dogs
pink cotton sugar balls spun about a paper cone & ozone
the spark of rides the Tilt-a-Whirl Bumper Cars The Whip
enter the House of Horrors seated snugly tucked
in a rickety car its metal wheels clacking sparking
hitting the metal doors with a stunning bang & you were
in a dark tunnel waiting for the witches skeletons
to attack spewed out the back with a whip-
like toss into the lights of the last fright –
the booth that sold tiny painted turtles 25 cents
that each year I prayed would live forever but
never did always dying as summer ended
Like Other People
a complex distortion
face strange enough to be sold
odd enough to be called freak
he found refuge among those
who display their difference
under banners at carny midways
the misfits grifters roustabouts
whose otherness was more easily hidden
his true name lost called by his shame
Jo-Jo the Dog Faced Boy a Barnum gift
The Human Terrier – the crowning mystery
of nature’s contradictions
normal folk felt better
knowing they were not him
Funicello made his misery a song
He starts to sing
Like a wounded hound
And the gals all screamed
And gathered round
everyone joined in the chorus
who cared there was a person
behind the hair
Bow wow, bow wow
Jo-Jo, the dog-faced boy
Bow wow, bow wow
Jo-Jo, the dog-faced boy
the howl so human
he cried as he told his friends
the truth of his desire
Eyes bugged out
Through a patch of wool
His face hung down
Like a Boston bull
all I want
is to be like other people
When Plone moved to San Francisco from Philadelphia, aged 19, to continue college, the first place he visited, on that first weekend, was Cannery Row, in Monterey. A voracious reader his whole life and Steinbeck one of his favorite authors, it was his trip to the Holy Land. He walked the streets with Doc, and met all his favorite characters. No mystery why he became a writer. Allen makes his living in the film and television production industry as a writer and director. He holds a Master’s Degree Comp.Lit/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and a PhD. History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Spent 9 years as a college professor, at San Jose State University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught Philosophy, Literature and Psychology and Creative Writing. He also taught screenwriting at University of Southern California, in their Graduate Writers Program before becoming a full-time writer/director. Allen’s passion is and has always been poetry and children’s stories. He’s combined the two in five of the children’s books he’s written; they’re all in rhymed couplets. He has published many poems in such journals as: Light Journal of Poetry and Photography, Moon Journal of Poetry, BTS Journal, The Sea Letter Journal, Celidah: A Journal of Poetry and others. He has also published several short stories, including “The Cowboy of My Heart,” which won the Rosebud Best Short Story award.
